Belle Wong: writer, reader, creativity junkie

Ray Bradbury and a short story a week

I gave up on it when things got really busy back during the end of January. Unlike the other 365 day projects I still want to do, I found I wasn’t really getting much out of it.

I had hoped that writing a sentence or two in response to daily prompts would give me story seeds that would spark something bigger. But after three weeks of doing it, it had become a tedious task I kept forgetting to do until the last minute.

Which was a good enough reason to drop it. There are already enough tedious tasks in the world that I have to do, why add more to the tedious task load in my life, right?

But I am still very much enamoured of the idea of story seeds and what they can lead to. And as is often the case with me, one thought leads to another and yet another and now I’m contemplating this:

Yes, there are actually people doing this challenge. There is even a Facebook page called “Ray Bradbury’s 52 week short story challenge to aspiring writers”.

I signed up for Sarah Selecky’s story prompts one year and came up with some good stuff. She sends you a prompt and you just write for ten minutes a day without really thinking about where the story is going. If this is something you want to try, go here: http://www.sarahselecky.com/daily-prompts/

You can opt out at any time. I did it for 6 months straight and then opted out when I fell into a sluggish hole called routine. Blah.

I am not in the right frame of mind to pick it up again. At least not right now/ But if I do I will definitely let you know. The prompts WERE good. Very different and creative. I’d never even think to write about those topics on my own.

This is an intriguing idea for a challenge! A couple of years ago now I tried to do an “essay a day” (reading challenge), which was a bust. I love essays, but making them an assignment felt tedious and I gave up. Maybe someday I’ll try that one again.

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I'm a writer, avid reader, artist-at-heart & book indexer. I blog about writing, books, art, creativity, spirituality, & the power of the imagination. Oh, and I like to write stuff about life in general, too!

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King

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